(Duffus 1947-1950)
Plus Est En Vous
I drive out of 1950 into 2002.
The Hyundai, product of the late 90s,
growls into Gordonstoun,
which has survived all those years
in the camera obscura of my mind,
reduced to a few unchanging images.
There's an unforecast morning brightness,
and I park under the oak
where only yesterday
I lay on the grass,
air sawing my windpipe
after my Silver in the five-mile-walk.
Gordonstoun House remains too,
and Cumming and Round Square,
but the great chestnut on the south lawn
has been felled and its tomb
so well filled
you'd never know it had been there
perished as though it had never been ;
but, as an extra in a Julius Caesar crowd
scene,
I'd snapped off one of its whisk-branches
to beat back my fly swarm
and recited rhubarb
togaed in a school blanket.
And somewhere on the gravel
a colour-bearer intoned:
Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir
you up
to such a sudden flood of mutiny.
The long- and the high-jump pits are gone.
Walk further by the lake, and you no longer
see
the assault course where we made our kamikaze
leaps
under the unblinking eye of Hahn with his
visitor.
Selected thus, who could resist the glory
of dying for Gordonstoun?
and we flew at the monkey net.
The rope too is gone.
Three times a boy had cut half through,
causing three accidents before Hahn realised
that 'moins était en lui'.
Now in this litigious age Gordonstoun itself
has cut the rope.
And so much else has gone
that I could make a list.
I will make a list:
crystal sets whispering after lights-out
in Duffus dormitories;
Low-Beer who played Ombra mai fu
on the piano, now reduced by a car crash
to a shade that’s never been;
Burchardt who skipped purple
in a Nissen hut as we interrupted the Aeneid
with blotting paper missiles
and who played Bach’s English Suite
masterfully while the other Houses
stamped out of assembly
(and no one knew he d been in the Intelligence
Corps);
Mr Kelly who made us dance our callisthenics;
a student whistling his pet raven out of
treetops;
our graveyard obstacle course still there
but with no boys leaping from tomb to tomb;
Farnell who was kind about my verse
and encouraged me to read The Excursion;
and many more.
Plus était en moi.
Yesterday's House
Yesterday’s house is closed.
You are advised:
UNSAFE TO MEMORY -
DANGER OF COLLAPSE.
You smash the lock
with a remembered bar,
granular-rusted,
familiar as an old friend
and as unreliable.
Yesterday’s house is dead
and yet you enter in,
pausing on quiet stairs.
A landing
is lit by afternoon;
you close your eyes
trying to recall past steps.
Is that the door?
It yields to your touch.
Here are the worm-eaten saints,
the windows that stare out on summer
and the blind lake.
A young boy leans against a sill
dreaming of how it will be.
Your palm rests on his shoulder
lightly, a gesture that attempts
to annihilates decades.
Dust is no longer falling in this house;
potentialities there are none; all is complete;
the broadleaves don’t fall
about it in the park;
no one needs point the turrets or the walls
and the Head Master’s crusted phone
gleams antiseptic waiting for the spray
of muesli that will never come.
Yesterday’s house, embalmed in memory,
will vanish with your death.
Uncertain pathways through its ancient rooms,
receding footsteps almost hiding Bach’s
undying love and scented magic,
Jessie's young bloom perennially young
and the bosom of the deep-breathing hill
masking the sea - all will be gone.
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and a sense of service to their fellow beings.
His philosophy was based on the fostering
of individual development in a community
context.